influxdb

Ever get an expensive power bill and want to know what appliance was the culprit? Maybe you want to learn how much an appliance is costing you? In today’s article, I show how you can use the Zooz Z-Wave Plus Power Switch with Home Assistant, InfluxDB and Grafana to track and plot an appliance’s energy usage and cost. The result is an easy to digest Grafana dashboard you can use to track what time of day your appliances are consuming the most energy and how much it’s costing you!

I’m using Z-Wave in this article, but feel free to substitute for whatever protocol your Home Automation setup is using. As long as you can get energy measurements for an appliance into Home Assistant you should be good to go!

How are you storing data collected in your Home Automation? Today’s article looks at a time series database called InfuxDB that Home Assistant can use to store all your sensor data in a database. Once the data is stored in the database you can analyze it for trends, create graphs and use the data in other applications. Ever feel restricted by the Home Assistant UI on how it shows data over a long time? InfluxDB is a tool to help you solve that!